Song of the Open Road: June - Los Angeles

L.A., the delirious fever dream of the world.

The sun is a spotlight that never goes out. The clouds come visit sometimes, but they know when to leave.

Oranges are bursting off the trees. The orange juice there is much more radiant, closer to life than in Ohio. Not as long deceased and preserved and frozen.

Enflamed flowers. They can't stop them from growing. The sun and the flowers decorate an otherwise grungy place.

Ohio weather has such bearing on everything, such presence and dominance. The seasons arrange and shape all life. L.A. weather just kind of leaves you alone.

A relaxed, stoned vibe to everything. Very warm, low key wavelength. Like a Beach Boys song playing everywhere.

The traffic is a procession of iron and smog going everywhere at once. A great snake devouring itself. The 405 is strangely unmonumental, not a gregarious American superhighway. Everyone drives slow. You change lanes anytime you need to. Cars do not swarm.

Operatic mountains, great red martian surfaces. Roads tangled through like intestines.

It's a holy place, the Hollywood Sign. We drove up to see it in the night and it was gone, vanished into the fog.

Hollywood mirrors the night sky. There are stars in the sidewalks.

You can't hardly get a glimpse of the ocean over the wall of houses. It's like standing tip-toe in the back row of a concert.

Color everywhere. Pink, orange, green, red. Hand-painted. A surprising lack of joy. Lapped over crumbly little apartments and strip malls. Little variety in architecture. Simple shelving for people shooting for the stars.

Presumably the beauty is all hidden behind topiary walls and shubbery.

A strange continuity to the place. Few breaks in style. Even Musso and Franks looks like a shithole from the outside.

The Hollywood Hills have unbelievable roads, lashing like a county fair ride assmbled and operated by a junky.

Paint flaking off the battered walls of the Paramount lot.

The women are fucking gorgeous. Professionally gorgeous. L.A. sucks up most of the beautiful people from everywhere else. They were born that way, they might as well try and derive money from it.

People very nice and not in a fake way. I'm nobody, after all, and they treated me well.

Little altars with candles and incense and effigies and pictures of mahareshis and yogis.

Everyone is in pictures. A little girl told me how to frame a snapshot of her and her friends.

It's like the sky has been botoxed. No snow. Little cold. Just a smile, lips.

Flying

Riding in an airplane, it's still this miraculous thing to me. You get in this steel airship and you're strapped in and suddenly you're lifted and soaring and next thing you're above the clouds. You look down as you take off and see your hometown turn into a little toy train set, the little cars going to and fro on the highways, doing the business of their happy little lives. "Goodbye everybody!" you wave as if you'll never return. It all looks imaginary from up there, like nothing horrible ever happens. It seems like a peaceful place.

You know what I think to myself as we're climbing up? I look out at the silver wing reaching out so strong and I think "Hold fast you mighty wing! Climb! Carry us safely onward and upward!" It's rather silly I know. I never really pay any attention to the people with me on the plane. It's always me and the wing and the clouds.

My favorite part of flying is when, if you're lucky, sometimes you'll look out the window and you'll just see white. White everywhere. Like you're outside of time and space, in some void. You're really in a cloud, but if look out the window just the right way and ignore everyone on the plane, you're just this man in the sky. Above the rain, lightning, tornadoes, oceans, everything, as if you're being carried by the hand of God Himself.

The Big Yolk. That's what I call it. The sun. The Big Yolk. The best time to fly is late afternoon into the evening. You get the day and the night. It's like a play. The sun makes his exit and whooooooooop, up comes the moon, stage left, right on cue.

Above the clouds
The clouds are
Now a mist
Now ice cream
Now a forest of white trees
Now raining
Now heaven
Now burying the sun
Now launching the moon

Train-train

The world is rolling around one more time,
giving me another chance to do the things I’ve
successfully deferred every day so far.
I go to the market
and a girl climbs into my eyes like they do every couple hours.
Reasons to fall assemble easily:
because of the way she’s smearing jelly
between two cookies with a dull, shiny knife,
because of the way she almost kisses the glass display case
when she breaths on it to clean it,
because of the way the flowers in black plastic barrels
surround her, eager to be gathered up and delivered
to her arms. (If it’s at all about love, it’s as much about
ferrying the flowers to their respective destinies)
Two models sit near me
looking just like how models are supposed to look, but somehow
they are not attractive to me, their beauty too flagrant a reminder
of the imbalance of things. I suspect I am not the kind
of man they require and silently rescind myself.
I prefer the jelly girl,
whose beauty is subdued by a kind of helplessness. She shares an
oppression with me, being meek enough to have arrived behind that counter,
at the mercy of the clock spinning her toward a boredom of her own choosing.

I should talk to her. Instead, I watch the
steam rising from my coffee, continually refreshing
the idea of death, which remains unconvincing.
In case I’m wrong, I should talk to her.
A hundred million years from now
none of it will have mattered
as right now all of it matters so much.
Every discarded moment piles into
an ever-rising crest of Now.
Now is here. That much is clear.
Go talk to her. Go talk to her. Go talk to her
(My mind is always giving an ineffectual pep talk,
I seem to be a sightseer touring all the various guilt trips of life).
I can’t think my way into the brief lapse of thought
we call courage. I’m entrenched. I've done all I can
to make myself impervious to chance,
to ensure safe, undisrupted passage down the corridor of each day.
I’ve plied my aloneness into solitude,
where shrewder ones have learned to
accompany it with people.

The familiar, gloomy conclusion
revises itself for today’s dilemma:
If I talk to her, it won’t make me any less alone.
Once again I have bartered bravery and the dim possibility
of elation for the patchy cloak of thought.

Starting home, I am pleased to feel
my feet hijack my body. They take me
on a detour by her booth.
I clutch an alibi: I’m only looking at the cakes.
I pretend to look at the cakes
while actually looking at the cakes
when I feel her walk up
(I've endowed her with such magnitude).

I brave a look at her.
She smiles at me.
I may have twitched
something back before fleeing.
I cherish the smile all day on into the night.
It justified the whole thing somehow.
She smiled at me. I've seen it.
Tomorrow I’ll say everything to her.

The Angel

The Angel perched atop the trophy,
wings outstretched,
watches the flannel-shirted man
drag his jangling cart of cans
over the snow-crusted sidewalk.

An Appeal

This old ship of earth is worn from wear;
Oil is bleeding into the ocean,
Volcanoes are hacking ash.
Sometimes I think humanity is only
the earth's most successful infestation;
We've minced the forests and piled
them into homes,
We've torn through the atmosphere
and lept all the way to the moon,
We've blasted the limits of sound,
All our successes drawn from
one another's veins.
Still, we reach further into the dark.

Don't take this world away.
Teach us to love it again.
Send the sun flourishing
through our windows.
Breath the wind through
our doors.
Resuscitate us.

Cricket

I was meditating, grateful to the miserable weather
for condoning my isolation, when I heard
a lone cricket throbbing through the cold, wet leaves.
What was he chanting? I wondered. Must he sing to live?
“help, help, help,” he ached, or maybe “please, please, please.”
I went out to find him but when I approached he
vanished into silence. I stood in the rain, listening,
wanting him to teach me how to endure, to thrive
in an inhospitable world, but he would not give himself up.
Back inside I found the silence I’d requested.
Today summer has been granted a reprieve.
Again, the crickets try to chirp
their way through the walls.